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Adrian Dix: Surviving all challenges

Dix was 28 and had just been ordered to check into hospital. Typically, he detoured to the office to get some work

B.C. NDP leader Adrian Dix talks sports and politics at Team 1040 radio in Vancouver. He revealed his serious sports trivia knowledge on the air.

Photograph by: Jason Payne
, VANCOUVER SUN

“You basically should be dead.”

That’s the way, in 1992, that B.C. New Democratic Party leader Adrian Dix heard he had Type 1 diabetes.

Then 28, he was a week away from running the Seattle Marathon, and was mixing late-evening runs with intense hours as a ministerial assistant to Glen Clark, who was then B.C.’s finance minister.

Two days in a row, Dix arrived in the office announcing he’d cancelled his workouts the night before because he’d been drinking too much, something Clark at first thought might have been a reference to an uncharacteristic night on the town for his young staffer. But Clark then heard it was instead a reference to drinking litre after litre of apple juice, something Ron Wickstrom, another ministerial assistant in the office, immediately flagged as a concern.

“So he (Dix) ends up going to the doctor and the doctor says, you basically should be dead,” Clark said in a recent interview, recalling how Dix had gone to a walk-in clinic just behind the legislature.

“You’re a full-blown diabetic, but you’re in such good shape, I guess that’s why you’re walking around. You’ve got to check into the hospital, right now.”

Clark relishes the next part of the story, knowing it’s classic Dix.

“So he doesn’t check into the hospital, he comes to the office, loads up three suitcases full of work and then checks into the hospital,” says Clark, who shared a Victoria condo with Dix for about six years, including the period when he was premier and Dix was his chief of staff.

“He was in for like three days or something until they stabilized his blood sugar and then he got out.”

Asked about that time, Dix was immediately reflective: “It was a bit of a momentous moment. It was a big deal.”

Since that diagnosis, Dix has had to take four injections of insulin a day into his abdomen; without medication, he could, among other complications, go blind.

He mostly manages the disease seamlessly, slipping briefly and silently into a washroom or out of a meeting for his regular injections.

It is this routine that allows him to continue his rugged 12-hour-plus days, which often stretch well into the evening.

For Clark, the story from 1992 demonstrates why his former top aide is the best choice for premier in the election campaign that launched April 16.

“Adrian is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever met,” he said. “Someone who is smart and works that hard is a very strong combination,” he added. “He’s kind of an introverted, shy, intelligent guy that wants to make a difference, so he works hard.”

Doug McArthur, who worked closely with Dix when he was Clark’s chief of staff, said Dix’s motivation goes beyond just hard work.

“I think what drives him is this ethic he has around responsibility, carefulness and I think part of that is fairness,” he said. “He’s a very careful guy. He doesn’t do things without thinking about them.”

Asked during the 2011 NDP leadership race if his health would get in the way of his job, Dix pointed to others who have thrived with diabetes: “If Bobby Clarke can captain the Philadelphia Flyers, I think I can be premier of British Columbia.”

For a period, however, the disease was not as easy to handle.

Dix said that between 2006 and 2010 he suffered from a frozen shoulder — or adhesive capsulitis — first on one side, and then the other.

The condition is not caused by diabetes, but is more common in people who have the disease.

“The arm locks into place, it’s very painful,” explained Dix. “In a certain place you can’t move it. … For quite a few years, I was unable to sleep for more than two or three hours at a time.”

Characteristically, this meant those who worked with and for him would awake in the mornings to find several emails documenting what Dix had been reading and thinking during his insomnia the previous night.

It only solidified his reputation as a workaholic.

Before running for the party leadership in 2011, Dix told The Vancouver Sun diabetes has “made me better.”

“It forces you to a routine and a discipline that is actually quite good. You can’t afford to miss lunch,” he said.

“I don’t underestimate it. It’s a challenge.”

What he hasn’t revealed until now, is that if his frozen shoulder had persisted much longer, Christy Clark would be facing a different adversary in this year’s election.

“Certainly, if I would have still been suffering that (locked shoulder), I wouldn’t have run for the leadership,” he said in a recent interview.

•

It’s mid-morning on a recent Friday, the day after Premier Christy Clark’s government had to admit it misspent $70,000 in public funds on the now-toxic ethnic voter strategy, and Dix couldn’t seem more relaxed.

Reclining in the corner of a Vancouver sports radio studio, the NDP leader meets questions from hosts at Team 1410 on sports, politics and life as a would-be premier with riffs on everything from his favourite movie (The Battle of Algiers) to an obscure dissertation on the history of professional wrestling.

“This is my view, that wrestling is a metaphor for the problems of the international economy,” he says, showcasing a sarcasm foreign to most in the province, but well known among his close friends and colleagues.

Across from him, the show’s three hosts are leaning in, rapt, and clearly getting more than they expected.

The man at the microphone bears little resemblance to the sometimes awkward, almost always serious, politician who is running to be premier on a promise to take “one practical step at a time.”

When Dix arrived that morning, the show hosts handed him a meat pie and a half-empty can of Guinness — their way of marking the imminent St. Patrick’s Day — along with a deferential assurance the coming interview wouldn’t be “too political”.

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” Dix tells host Joe Leary, clearly not obsessing too much over what an on-air gaffe could do to his party’s massive 20-point lead in the polls. “It’s a casual show.”

What followed was indeed just that.

Dix spoke candidly and colourfully of scoring nine to 10 points a game during his high school basketball career at Point Grey secondary, reminisced about learning French from broadcasts of the Montreal Expos, and was stumped on a question about his first kiss.

“Wow. Um. 1977.” he said, punctuating each word with a long uneasy silence. “In the back yard.”

Interspersed were references to a range of characters, including NFL linebacker Charles Haley, actor Zach Galifianakis, and Roy and Art Miki, who fought for redress for Japanese-Canadians after they were interned in the Second World War.

Hardly the talking points you’d expect from a politician on the verge of becoming premier.

To spend a day with Dix is to be both humbled and exhausted by references to literature, sports, politics and even popular culture.

He’s a man who seeks solace by devouring books or dissecting the minutiae of just about any sport. In both work and leisure, he is not satisfied just watching, but instead must involve himself in every detail.

It’s a lesson one of the show’s hosts, BC Lions star Angus Reid, was about to learn as Dix’s eyes wandered during one answer to NFL replays cycling on one of the in-studio TVs.

“We’ve got the TV on here, I see (NFL star) Steven Jackson, who went to school where, Angus?” asked Dix.

Cao, a Vietnamese immigrant, said she introduced Dix to her community association, and that he has since taken a great interest in their activities.

“A lot of my people like him. He attends every event if he’s in town,” she said.

She added she’s “proud” to cut Dix’s hair, saying she puts him alongside her other celebrity client, Chuck Norris, whom she did hair extensions for several years ago at a salon in downtown Vancouver.

Not far away, at Gladstone secondary school, teacher Todd Ablett talks about how Dix stepped in to help his students reach the world title in robotics.

“He heard about this and he came to the school, he helped us fundraise,” said Ablett, adding raising money in East Vancouver is not always easy. “Ever since then, he has been great at bragging about us.”

A 15-minute walk away, at Renfrew elementary school, people have a similar story to tell.

Teacher Suzanne Salter recalled how in the late 1990s, just after Dix was forced to resign as Clark’s chief of staff, Dix stepped up to coach a basketball team.

“I had an overwhelming number of Grade 6/7 boys sign up and I just wasn’t able to have them all on the team. I ended up having to cut kids. I just felt terrible,” she recalled, saying Dix somehow heard about the need and offered to step in and coach a second team.

“Knowing what was going on for Adrian in his political career, I thought to myself, there’s a man at his lowest ebb, and he’s stepping in and coaching these kids that were really disappointed they weren’t able to play on the team,” she said.

“I always had a soft spot for him.”

•

Dix’s glaring political liability is the infamous “memo to file” he crafted late one evening in 1998 while working as chief of staff to Clark, who was then the premier.

Though long in his past, the memo, which he acknowledges backdating, has set an indelible stain on his political career — one many thought he could never overcome.

Dix has repeatedly taken responsibility, including in a recent interview: “From my perspective, I was wrong and I’ve acknowledged that. Not just to the world, which was important, but to myself.”

When asked about the specific details, however, he referred to his testimony as a Crown witness during the related criminal trial against Clark.

On May 6, 2002, Dix told B.C. Supreme Court that on one evening in September or October of 1998 — possibly on a weekend — he sat down at his office computer in Victoria to formally document a conversation he’d had months before with Clark about a potential conflict of interest.

“On July 13th, 1998, I had a conversation with the Premier with respect to casino licenses in Burnaby. He reported to me that a neighbour, a Mr. Pillarinoos (sp?) was one of the applicants for a casino in Burnaby,” he wrote in the memo.

“Mr. Pillarinoos is a friend of the Premier whose kids attend the same elementary school,” he continued. “Given this relationship, the Premier asked me to ensure that he take no part in any aspect of the decision on Burnaby casinos.”

By Dix’s account, the memo was a formal summary of handwritten notes he’d taken during his July meeting, as well as at a subsequent meeting with Mike Farnworth, then the minister responsible for gambling.

“It was very unusual. I can’t think of another occasion when Mr. Clark mentioned that anyone from his neighbourhood or anything else had business with the government, and so it was, it was slightly unusual,” he told the court, explaining why he typed the memo.

What happened next has haunted Dix ever since, becoming the foundation of a recent series of B.C. Liberal attack ads.

After printing the memo from his computer, Dix walked from his office to the desk of his secretary, Gurmeet Sall, and grabbed the date stamp marked “OFFICE OF THE PREMIER”. He rolled the date back to July 17, 1998, stamped the memo and placed it into a drawer on the left-hand bottom corner of his desk.

What’s more, when the memo was publicly released in an effort to defend Clark from allegations of a conflict, Dix was not clear about how and when the memo had been created.

“It was a serious mistake in judgment in my view ... not being clear with people when it was given to others, including to the premier,” he told the court.

“The fact is, when I gave evidence before with the police and in other places, I was asked detailed questions obviously about when it was made and answered them,” he continued.

“The fact of the way the memorandum was, was put together, was done, the timing of it clearly hurt the credibility of the document and I know that, and I understand that, and I’m fully responsible for it.”

Though he has taken responsibility for the memo, it still hangs over his character.

When he was caught last year riding the SkyTrain without a valid fare receipt, the story quickly turned to references of the memo.

And then there are the Liberal-friendly ads saying he “was found to have forged a document in the premier’s office during the course of an RCMP commercial crime squad investigation.”

Dix calls that advertising campaign “not truthful or fair,” but is adamant about not striking back.

“They want to have some sort of contrived political brawl. I’ve decided — and it’s a big risk, actually because there’s a lot you could say about them if you wanted to get into it, they’ve been in power for 12 years — but I’ve decided to go a different route.”

Clark said he’s tried to urge Dix away from his attachment to boy scout politics, to little avail.

“I’d be much more aggressive in both defending myself and attacking them,” he said. “He’s making a bet that people are tired of it and not influenced by it. I hope he’s right.”

•

Sitting in the window of his favourite independent Vancouver coffee shop — Dix doesn’t like Starbucks because of the role its CEO, Howard Schultz, played in moving the Seattle Sonics to Oklahoma City — Dix draws a firm line. He’ll talk about his battle with diabetes, own up to the very public mistakes of his past and cast a cautious light on how he views his political future.

But there’s a wall — protected with fierce and deliberate intensity — around his private life, namely his immediate family.

He’ll tell you that his immigrant parents, Ken and Hilda Dix, taught him the early lessons of equality by the way they treated their customers at the family-owned insurance business.

“We always joke my dad would run off his best client, his most lucrative client, every year and he’d spend weeks and weeks helping out clients he didn’t make any money from,” said Dix.

He’ll let on that it was probably his mother’s fondness of the federal Liberal Party that had Dix, in his mid-teens, considering himself a Trudeau Liberal.

But little else.

Of his wife, Renee Saklikar, he speaks with loving adoration, but sticks mostly to generalities.

“She’s a brilliant and thoughtful person and we care very deeply for each other. I think it’s natural to want to be protective of that,” he said of the woman whose face adorns his BlackBerry wallpaper.

There’s irony in this, given Saklikar gave serious consideration in 1996 to running to become an NDP MLA in New Westminster.

A member of the party for longer than Dix, she worked under Glen Clark as the premier’s special adviser on youth, and then later as the director of the premier’s youth office.

Saklikar is a lawyer, but took a dramatic career shift and became a writer and poet after the sudden death in 2002 of her father, the Rev. Vasant Saklikar.

Vasant was raised a Hindu but converted to Christianity and became the minister at the Sixth Avenue United Church in New Westminster. He also sat on the school board and established the city’s first food bank.

“In the wake of such loss, and having always been a ‘closet poet’, Saklikar found the courage to pursue her passion. She made the choice to become a poet, enrolled in The Writer’s Studio at SFU Continuing Studies, and never looked back,” said a piece on the Simon Fraser University website to promote an event showcasing her poetry.

That piece quoted her as saying her former career “was a wonderful opportunity with lots of success, but some part of me longed for more.”

Of her attraction to poetry, Saklikar said: “People are interested in language; they’re interested in words. And poetry is so much about that, along with image, rhythm and sound. As human beings we crave that.

“In an increasingly fractured and disconnected world, poetry gives us something to come home to.”

Dix and Saklikar have no children, with Dix saying he would not have run for leader if they did.

“I just think that from a time perspective it would be hard,” he said.

Dix has a sister, Wendy, who works in the Ontario public service, and a brother, Dylan, who works for a diamond company, that, among other things, processes stones pulled from the Victor Mine near Attawapiskat.

Members of Dix’s family were not available for interviews with The Sun, something Dix strongly defended.

“I think I’m very conscious of trying — in a job that doesn’t allow much space — trying to preserve what space we have,” Dix explained.

He said many politicians try to have it both ways, showcasing their family when it’s expedient, and then trying to shield them when the inevitable backlash of a life in politics rears its head.

“I think you’ve got to be very prudent in that,” Dix says, saying he’d prefer to guard his private life. “Ultimately I own my mistakes. So I’m conscious of not doing anything to impose those on them.”

Among the other boundaries that Dix draws is around his faith.

Dix was raised Anglican, but rarely discusses that in public: “It (faith) is important but I also see it largely as a private issue,” he said.

Dix did offer a window into his spirituality, however, at a leadership prayer breakfast in Vancouver, where he was asked to give his thoughts on a passage from the New Testament, a section of Paul’s letter to the Romans.

The breakfast is normally off limits to media, but came on a day when Dix was being shadowed by The Vancouver Sun. His staff approved the use of his comments that day, where he told the crowd that the passage he’d been asked to read and comment on “reflects on two qualities I think that we need in leadership and we need in life. One is patience and the other is hope.”

“We often get buffeted from day to day, from question period to question period, from news cycle to news cycle, sometimes even from tweet to tweet. And it’s important, essential, that we stay centred on patience, on standing firm, on understanding what we know and understanding what we don’t know,” he continued.

“I think many of us who went to Sunday school saw pageants of this story, of this remarkable story of the persecutor becoming the apostle. I take from that story the idea that an act of faith leads to grace and grace is the gift beyond all understanding,” he added.

“This particular piece speaks to the nature of patience, the fact that faith and belief is not something that’s a one-time occasion, but a process and sometimes a struggle.”

•

On the eve of the B.C. Liberal convention last fall, Dix strode onto a stage at the Hotel Vancouver and without a scrap of paper for notes, delivered a disarming — some even suggested charismatic — half-hour address to a ballroom overflowing with the city’s business elite.

Canfor was at the NDP fundraiser that night, as was Chevron and CIBC. Even Enbridge put down the $3,500 required to buy a table at the sold-out event.

One business leader was overheard joking that for the first year in recent memory, the party’s annual Leader’s Levee “didn’t feel like a hostage-taking.”

In his speech, Dix repeated his commitment to raise corporate taxes and to impose a minimum tax on financial institutions — both unpopular among the business leaders in the room.

But he also called for a need “to change the relationship of government to business,” especially in the area of skills training.

“We can ensure that when there is opportunity in British Columbia that it’s British Columbians who have access to those jobs and bring back wealth to communities where they live and where they raise their families,” he said. “This can only happen when government and business and labour work together.”

The speech was the most visible manifestation of an effort Dix has made since becoming leader to court the business crowd, and make them more comfortable with the idea of an NDP government.

He has spent hours moving from boardroom to boardroom, giving a similar version of the same assurances. Some have left the meetings with an open mind about the possibility of a Dix government.

Blair Qualey, president and CEO of the New Car Dealers Association of B.C., challenged Dix in his meeting, telling the NDP leader “many of our folks are a bit trepidatious about the return of an NDP government, if it was like the one that was in power in the 1990s, because our industry was hammered with a number of levies and taxes.”

Qualey said what he got in return was a pleasant surprise.

“I think my comment may have caught him a little off guard. His response, I thought, was very measured and thoughtful. He said we learned a lot from our time in government before.

“I found him prepared and interested and asked good thoughtful questions,” he said. “I think he understands our issue and we’ll have to wait and see, if they form government, what they chose to do.”

For others, Dix’s efforts have been futile.

“The business community, I find, is very, very, very wary of the guy,” said Phillip Hochstein, president of the Liberal-aligned Independent Contractors and Businesses Association.

“They’re willing to meet with him and present their ideas and what’s important, but they’re very, very wary because at the end of the day he’s a hard-left politician who believes in a much broader role for the public sector.”

Hochstein said he met with Dix in Vancouver last year, and found him “very nervous”.

“A lot of tics, pulling up and pulling down his sleeves. He was very uncomfortable. I was surprised,” he said.

“I wished him well, but no good luck in the election.”

•

It’s the winter of 1989. At a raucous federal NDP leadership convention, a young Adrian Dix pulls his boss into a quiet corner of the Winnipeg Convention Centre to deliver a hard truth.

“You’ve got to drop out,” Dix says to Ian Waddell, then the MP from Port Moody–Coquitlam–Port Coquitlam and in the running in the race to replace Ed Broadbent as federal NDP leader.

At the time, Dix was Waddell’s campaign manager and was trying to implore his candidate to step out gracefully before the next round of voting did it for him.

After all, the numbers were clear.

Of the 2,400 votes cast in the first round, Waddell had claimed only 213.

The clear front runners were Audrey McLaughlin and former B.C. premier Dave Barrett, who had both pulled in more than 500 votes each.

Defeat is a hard thing to admit, especially, Waddell recalled, when being delivered by someone almost half your age.

“I ran because I wanted to make some issues. They were good issues, environment issues, aboriginal issues. I got 213 votes and I wanted to continue,” Waddell recalled recently.

“This was like a 25-year-old kid or something, he takes me behind the scenes at the convention and says, ‘You’ve got to drop out’.

“Why? I’m doing OK?” Waddell recalled pressing back.

“No. You’re dropping out. You’re going to go down.”

Not long after that conversation, Waddell slowly made his way across the convention floor — several of his delegates in tow — and threw his support behind Barrett.

“It was a tough decision,” Waddell told a reporter at the time. “But in politics, you have to decide.”

“I was amazed by his maturity and forcefulness, and he was right because (dropping out) added to my reputation rather than diminished it,” said Waddell, who years after that leadership race would be a minister in Glen Clark’s government, where Dix was chief of staff.

In an interview, Waddell said he thinks Dix will carry that maturity and thoughtfulness into the premier’s office.

“He’ll be an interesting premier. He’s very detailed, smart, thorough and I think he’ll play his cards fairly close to his chest,” he said. “He’s not flashy but he’s a hell of a worker and he’s got good judgment.”

Glen Clark agreed, saying Dix will be a significant change from the styles of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, both who deliberately seek to seize the agenda with grand visions and big announcements.

“I think he’ll be much less flamboyant than we’ve had in British Columbia for a while. Much less in your face,” he said, sounding hopeful, but not yet fully convinced that the public is ready for such a major swing.

“He’s not a quick, shoot from the hip guy. He’s very studious. He tries hard, and prides himself, on very comprehensive reviews of things. You won’t get flash,” he said.

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